Why did Jake Gyllenhaal stripping to his underwear and channeling his inner skunk kill a movie in 4 days flat?

Who doesn’t like Jake Gyllenhaal? Unlike many Hollywood mainstays, the 43-year-old actor has managed to avoid any of the bad press that so many of his contemporaries have faced in recent years. From Donnie Darko to Brokeback Mountain to Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal has starred in so many beloved movies across his career and has earned himself a reputation as a real stand-up dude into the bargain.

That’s why it’s so shocking that we’re hearing he was allegedly acting very un-Jake Gyllenhaal-like on the set of cancelled movie Suddenly. Back in June 2021, Gyllenhaal was cast alongside Vanessa Kirby in the U.S/European thriller from director Thomas Bidegain, about a couple trapped on an inhospitable island. In December 2023, the movie finally released in Bidegain’s native France, with an all-European cast. So what happened to the original version? According to the director, it’s all Gyllenhaal’s fault.

What happened to the movie Suddenly starring Jake Gyllenhaal?

In an eye-opening interview with French site Technikart, Bidegain paints an alarming picture of Gyllenhaal’s allegedly erratic behavior on set. He claims the star’s bewildering mood shifts caused the production to blow through $30 million in just four days, ultimately resulting in its swift closure and eventual rebirth away from Hollywood.

For starters, it seems Gyllenhaal and Bidegain were at loggerheads over the creative direction of the film, with the leading man apparently advocating for just not a script rewrite but a full re-conceptualization of the story just eight weeks before filming was due to begin, even though sets were already being built. OK, so creative differences, nothing new there. But it’s when shooting kicked off in Iceland that things supposedly got really weird…

Alarm bells were rung for Bidegain when the actor apparently performed the first reading rehearsal with a faux-French accent that he compares to Looney Tunes skunk Pepe Le Pew. The director alleges that Gyllenhaal would frequently yell at him, often over bizarre demands — at one stage, the star is said to have requested that he get to drive a car that was “neither red nor white.” His own off-the-cuff pitches for scenes were met with confused reactions from the crew. “For a scene on a boat, [Gyllenhaal] sells us the idea that he slaps a fish,” Bidegain recalled.

The strangest revelation from the filmmaker’s stroll down memory lane recalls the time when Gyllenhaal is said to have to stripped down to his underwear and dived into the ice-cold Icelandic ocean. “When I see the sea, I swim in the sea,” is what the actor told Bidegain by way of explanation. Technikart’s report includes a set photo which seems to capture Gyllenhaal post-plunge.

On the fourth day, the bad atmosphere on set reached a peak when a germophobic Gyllenhaal supposedly ordered that set builders had to sleep in their cars instead of in the cast and crew’s hotel to avoid a COVID outbreak. At the end of the day, Bidegain was forced to phone up producer Alain Attal and make a “heartbreaking” pronouncement. “Our visions diverge too much,” he told him. “We won’t be able to shoot in September… It’s all over, and the €26 million is gone!”

Kirby, for her part, was apparently loyal to her co-star. The director alleges that, weeks after the meltdown in Iceland, the Napoleon actress reached out to Bidegain and Attal in an attempt to buy the rights to the script so she and Gyllenhaal could make the movie with another director. Naturally, Bidegain turned down the offer and went on to rewrite his screenplay in French, retitling it Soudain Seuls, and cast Gilles Lellouche and Melanie Laurent in the lead roles.

The Iceland incident didn’t dent Gyllenhaal’s career in any way, however, as he’s set to star in Prime Video’s incoming Road House remake — I mean, that’s also caused controversy due to its director’s remarks, but not because of Gyllenhaal this time. Thankfully, that movie didn’t film near any open bodies of water.

UPDATE Feb. 1, 2024: StudioCanal reached out to We Got This Covered with the following statement in response to the Suddenly situation:

“Creative differences are very normal, if unfortunate, regularities in film development,” said a spokesperson for StudioCanal. “In this case, there were concerns which simply could not be overcome despite great efforts on both sides. We greatly value all our relationships at STUDIOCANAL and are happy that Thomas Bidegain was able to fulfill his vision on the French language version of SUDDENLY. We remain deeply committed to our working partnerships with both Thomas Bidegain and Jake Gyllenhaal, with whom we have always enjoyed a very strong creative relationship.”